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A novel way for private citizens to control the explosive growth of wild horses. The Beaty Butte Wild Horse Training Facility in tiny Adel, Oregon is breaking new ground in the debate over wild horse management on America’s public lands.

The Beaty Butte Wild Horse Training Facility is a grass-roots non-profit organization started by local ranch families who have joined forces to help the Bureau of Land Management maintain sustainable numbers of wild horses on a local range called Beaty Butte by offering the horses for adoption through a locally-run training program. The upcoming First Annual Beaty Butte Mustang Adoption Event will be the program’s first offering of trained Beaty Butte Mustangs to the public. It also marks the official debut of this unprecedented team effort to keep a vast southern Oregon desert landscape thriving.

In Oregon and across the West, the BLM has struggled with keeping wild horse populations within established limits as adoption numbers have sharply fallen and horse numbers have increased. But trained mustangs are a different story, being in high demand but short supply. The Beaty Butte Wild Horse Training Facility has recruited local expertise in the grandfather-grandson team of Jim Hiatt (facility manager) and Catlin Martin (head trainer) to make trained mustangs available to an eager horse-loving public.

Martin is an Adel native, a soft-spoken cowboy with ginger side-burns who regularly trains racehorses in Kentucky, as well as innumerable ranch horses closer to home. A skilled practitioner of low-stress natural horsemanship techniques, Martin has gentled and started hundreds of horses under saddle. This upcoming adoption event will see Martin’s first mustang pupils—Flash Gordon, Chuck Wagon, Napoleon, Lefty, and six others go through the sale ring and start new futures with new families. (Many of the mustangs have already accumulated an eager fan following on the Beaty Butte Wild Horses Facebook page.)

This is a unique opportunity to adopt one of a highly limited number of trained Beaty Butte Mustangs. The horses are available at competitive bid adoption, with the horse going to the highest bidder. The Event will also offer previews of the horses, mustang handling demonstrations, cowboy and western arts vendors, and auction items to benefit the non-profit program. All auction events and vendor fair are free and open to the public. For people who have always dreamed of owning a trained mustang, or maybe just want to sample Oregon’s authentic cowboy culture, you can’t afford to miss this first of its kind event.